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Food in the sky? Highrise farming idea gains ground

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This is an idea which is coming, and will further come, to fruition (pun intended).

Pasona link here: http://www.dezeen.com/2013/09/12/pasona-urban-farm-by-kono-designs/

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It is goo idea but using lot of pesticides would be not very healthy for humans in this type of situation.

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25psotJan. 29, 2014 - 01:14PM JST It is goo idea but using lot of pesticides would be not very healthy for humans in this type of situation.

Why would you need pesticides in a sealed environment? Unless you open a window and let in some nasty bugs then there's no way for them to get in.

In fact a high-rise farm like this, where there's no tractors spewing oil and fumes across the crops, no need for pesticides in a sealed environment, controlled pollination by in-house bees, etc. could probably get organic certification much more easily than most farms.

Sure the environment is artificial, but farming iself is artificial, because we're actively planting things where they wouldn't grow naturally. What does it matter if the plant grows in a field or in a 1m deep trough fed with fertilizer from the pigs on the floor above, fertilized by in-house bees and grown as part of the food and air processing equipment for a building full of people.

The real problem with this idea is space. The absolute minimum space required to feed a single person is 0.07 hectares, which is 700 meters squared... EACH. To put this in context, the typical single-occupancy apartment in Tokyo is about 20 square meters (215 square feet) and in New York about 37 square meters (400 square feet).

What this means is that the ratio of apartments to farming space in the building would be about 1:24. Or to put it more simply, if you had a 50 storey apartment building there would be 48 storeys reserved for farming and only 2 floors for people to live on.

... of course this project is only window-dressing about being "self-contained". What the designer actually means is that each resident will get to play at being a farmer by fiddling around in a couple of square meters of garden and feel like they're being "self-sustained", and there'll be a petting zoo on one of the floors with chickens and cows (but nothing smelly or nasty like pigs)... but actually 99% of the food will be bought in from farms outside (with maybe a bit of soil left on it to make it look "fresh from the building's farms").

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The man is indeed a true visionary - his concepts could also easily translate to Space Station Freedom with little change - at least once it is finished and can actually create a sustainable gravity well of its own

I would love to live in such a building

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